"Of all lies, art is the least untrue." -Gustave Flaubert

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I remember visiting the Rhode Island School of Design when I applied to graduate school there (may they forever rue their shortsightedness). The Chairman of the Fine Arts program said that they taught their students to fail, and try again, and fail, and try again. And Milton Glaser, famous graphic designer and founder of my school, SVA, has said, “You must embrace failure. You must admit what is. You must find out what you’re capable of doing, and what you’re not capable of doing.” I would add to this that sometimes the failure is in the idea, not the execution. Each failure teaches us something, so that if we continue to take risks, we fail up.

Airless unworkable studio. Can’t breathe!

Hence the end of the big blue box. I got it to work, my concept was sound, I could imagine the stack of ever-smaller boxes reaching to the ceiling. But then I realized that I was avoiding my studio. I couldn’t make work. That damn blue box was sucking all the air out of my space. Aaah. Space. That was the problem. That studio wasn’t big enough for the both of us. And it wasn’t fun anymore. It was a chore. Art made without passion cannot communicate passion to the viewer. Even giant origami.

Rachel and Nadia ignore the elephant in the room while I destroy it.

I tentatively approached my friend Rachel, who had toiled so hard with me to make the enormous albatross, and told her I was thinking of getting rid of it. She laughed and said she had wondered how long it would take me to figure out that it had to go. She generously helped me lift the lid, fold it carefully and take it to HER studio. She will no doubt find something incredibly meaningful to do with it. Then I cut all the supports out of the bottom of the box and crumpled the 225 square feet of heavy ocean-blue paper into the world’s largest paperweight. It now sits in an empty studio around the corner. One of my classmates will want it. There is very little waste in communal studio space.

Free to good home.

I feel much lighter now, and ready to go back to work. How about some teeny-tiny origami?

When we last left our big blue box, it had slumped over like a murder victim on a park bench. It was crushed and so was I.

But hope springs eternal in the human breast (thank you Alexander Pope) and the minute I stopped thinking about how to solve my problem, the answer came to me. I built an infrastructure for the box, using foam-core and mat boards, and then folded the beautiful ocean-blue paper around the cardboard playpen. No tape required – I had already cheated enough.

Reinforcing the base

Yay! Box standing up! My invaluable friend Rachel helped me move it into my studio after I cleaned and swept and pushed everything to the side, leaving enough free room only for the box and two admirers to enter the space at a time.

Yay! Box standing up!

Then we made the lid – which is exactly the same process as making the bottom, except the folds are made slightly further from the center point so that the ensuing box (which turns over to become lid) has dimensions just a little bigger than the base. We were so much better at doing this the second time that I really feel we should hire ourselves out as a gigantic origami team. Surely demand is peaking right now!

Rachel after the big move into the studio

Carefully carrying our lid to my studio, we placed it over our now sturdy base and then stood back to watch what disaster would befall us next. Hold our breath… don’t move… and nothing happened. That was the best nothing I had seen in a long time. The lid sat firmly on the reinforced side panels of our big blue box. Perfect. Long periods of appreciating our handiwork ensued.

Big Blue Box complete!

So you’re thinking: okay, great job, amazing artists. But don’t forget that this is just the first box of a stack that is intended to reach the ceiling. Total of 8 or 10 or 12 – just high enough not to hit the duct work that we ARE ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN to touch. The next box is supposed to be about 4 feet across. That means a piece of paper 12 feet square for the base and another for the lid. The piecing and creasing continue.

A 2-inch box. No construction issues here! Could this be our pinnacle?

And will we need to reinforce our next creation? Or will that extra weight crush the fragile base box? Will the blue lid we just installed sag under the weight? If we were engineers we would know that in advance. After all, engineers don’t build bridges and then wait to see if cars will fall through them. But we are not engineers, we are dreamers.

After one of our Magical-Return-to-Childhood Craft Nights at school I got a little hooked on origami. We were making paper cranes, which I continued to do on my own, even though I pretty much suck at them. I also learned to make little lidded boxes. Adorable! And if you make them in descending sizes, they stack like ziggurat temples. Even more adorable!

Origami behaving as it should

And then I got the idea, which because it is summer vacation no one discouraged me from pursuing, of making stacking origami boxes bigger. Much much bigger. How cool would that be? I wondered. I did a little math on my $5 Staples calculator (do not tell me my phone has a calculator. I know this. I prefer the bigger buttons). If I wanted to make an origami box that was six feet across, I would need to start with paper about eighteen feet square. Okay. That sounded pretty doable.

Where were the critical voices then? Where were the professors telling me that it was a stupid idea? That it was meaningless art? That I am not Japanese and therefore cannot use origami to express myself and my culture? Well, they were on summer vacation, too. And I was left with my studio mates who also thought it was a pretty cool idea. Tunnel vision. Groupthink!

Big Blue Box Bottom (in process) (Photo by Wei Xiaoguang.)

The biggest floor in our studios is in the crit space where we have our workshop classes. I carved out a large empty area and swept up the dirt. I ordered a roll of paper nine feet wide by 36 feet long. It was the biggest paper I could find. Then I measured the crit space, only to discover that it was 12 feet wide. Did this discourage me? No. But I adjusted my project to start with a five-foot box, which would require paper only 15 feet square. I know. I know. 15 is still larger than 12. I could have started with a four-foot box, which would have needed a sheet of paper 11.5 feet square, but NO. That was not big enough for me. I decided to go with the 15 x 15, which I already KNEW wouldn’t fit in my workspace.

As I STAND under the paper I have my first inklings of disaster. (Photo by Wei Xiaoguang.)

My friend Rachel announced that I couldn’t possibly handle this project all by myself. She was completely right and generously volunteered to help me wrangle paper. It took all afternoon to make the box bottom, during which process the paper got crinkled and torn as we pieced it, taped parts of it to the wall, folded it back and forth, and had to check the directions on making boxes. When it was finally folded perfectly, it looked gorgeous – WHILE WE HELD IT UP.

Success! (Photo by Wei Xiaoguang.)

As soon as we let go, it completely collapsed: an ocean-blue origami soufflé. Not sure what to do next, we dragged it through the hallways (more damage) and deposited it in an empty studio, as I tried to convince myself and Rachel that putting a lid on it was going to give it structure. Neither of us believed me.

Big Blue Box Bottom shows its true colors

So much hard work. Not sure what to do next. Warning: a five-foot origami box does not behave like a five-inch origami box. Just saying.